For this weeks meeting agenda...

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 15:53 -0500, Patrick Barnes wrote:
> Suggestion:  Why don't you go ahead and write a wiki page about the
> assorted filesystems, their strengths and weaknesses, and why some
> aren't currently in Fedora.  You could create the page at
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ/FileSystems and let me know when it is
> ready for review.  Once we have a good version in place, we can write in
> just a small statement on the FedoraMyths page and direct the curious to
> the new page.  If you would like to follow the progress of filesystem
> support and keep that page a living document, that would be great. 
> We'll also create a link to the new page directly off of the FAQ.

Actually, I've written a _lot_ on XFS since I produced some RPMs back in
early 2001 (just months prior to the official SGI XFS 1.0 release).

I have a larger, technical discussion on Ext3 and XFS is in my blog here
which covers a _lot_ of recent status:  
  http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/08/filesystem-fundamentals-and-practices.html  

I could probably dig up my posts from 2000, 2001, 2002 on-ward on my
usage of different filesystems.  One legacy one from June 2001 is
here:  
  http://www.geocities.com/thebs413/ITEC_JFS_2001Jun13.pdf  

In a nutshell, I adopted Ext3 in 2000 after SuSE told me that ReiserFS
would not be a feasible filesystem for kernel NFS.  I have a few
colleagues with SuSE that are "frank" on the continuing issues with
ReiserFS for such applications.

As far as JFS, the problem was that it was ported from OS/2, and _not_
the AIX implementation.  So the Linux JFS port was basically *0* ready
for an UNIX-like platform, and the resulting "re-write" occurred.  It
had more to do with IBM honoring their Non-Compete clause with SCO in
their Monterey agreement.  This was prior to IBM breaking and violating
the agreement (which SCO sued over years later), so they were honoring
it at the time the Linux JFS fork came about.

Since then, I've been deploying XFS.  Once the SGI XFS 1.2 release hit,
I put it into serious production.  But the lack of good integration in
the kernel, even 2.6 (although much better than 2.4) has left me _not_
trusting anything except official SGI XFS kernels.  And I've had trouble
integrating anything but the old 1.2.x for RHL7.3 and 1.3.1 for RHL9
releases.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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